Video: Masking a woman from the background

All right, we are still working inside of Photoshop, ladies and gentlemen, and for those of you who are thinking "hello! McFly, I'm under the impression that this is an Illustrator series. Will we by any chance be returning to Illustrator any time soon?" And the answer is yeah, pretty soon. We have got a few more exercises here inside of Photoshop because I really want to highlight a few things. First of all, one of many ways to go about preparing an image inside of Photoshop for use inside of Illustrator. But I want you to really understand, Photoshop excels at photographs in particular and pixels in general and that's where you do your pixel work and you get all of your pixel work done inside of Photoshop, if you are smart. Best practice before you bring the image into Illustrator where you can work the vector magic.

Knowing the fundamentals of drawing and reshaping paths is only part of the story. In Illustrator CS4 One-on-One: Advanced, the second of the popular One-on-One series, computer graphics expert Deke McClelland covers some of Illustrator's most powerful and least understood features. He shows how to merge simple shapes to create complex ones with the Pathfinder palette, as well as align paths to create schematic illustrations. Deke explains how to paint fluid, multicolor fills with blends, and the new and improved gradient tool. He explores seamlessly repeating tile patterns, blobs and brushes, and imported images. He also dives into one of the deepest features in all of Illustrator, transparency. Exercise files accompany the tutorial.

Masking a woman from the background

All right, we are still working inside of Photoshop, ladies and gentlemen, andfor those of you who are thinking "hello! McFly, I'm under the impression thatthis is an Illustrator series. Will we by any chance be returning toIllustrator any time soon?" And the answer is yeah, pretty soon. We have got afew more exercises here inside of Photoshop because I really want to highlight a few things.First of all, one of many ways to go about preparing an image inside ofPhotoshop for use inside of Illustrator. But I want you to really understand,Photoshop excels at photographs in particular and pixels in general and that'swhere you do your pixel work and you get all of your pixel work done inside ofPhotoshop, if you are smart. Best practice before you bring the image intoIllustrator where you can work the vector magic.

So I have to gone ahead and saved my progress as Masked filters.psd. In this exercise we are going to masking this woman away from her background. Nownotice that she has got this shoulder with this hair sort of popping up in thebackground and actually it's a chair, isn't it? It's a very, very out of focuschair. That doesn't really serve my purposes. If you switch over to Illustratorand take a look at Final advertisement. ai also inside the 20_images folder,you will see that I masked her hair like so and then we have got alittle bit of hair down here and then this things just sculpts through her shoulder.

So her shoulder is gone; we don't have shoulder over here. Instead we have gotall kinds of wonderful, beautiful filigree. All right, so what I have done is Ihave made a decision. So, if you go over to the Channels palette, you can seethe decision I made. Here is Hair Mask and I did a pretty darn good job oftracing her hair. Her hair was a little difficult to mask, because there's somuch softness going on there. And I didn't really want to spend the rest of my lifeon the project so I did a basic hair mask and you can see that I'mtracing these hairs down there, and then I'm just sculpting right there, notice that.

So I'm tracing this line. I want you to see White represents the area that willbe keeping, Black represents the area that will be going transparent, thatwe'll be getting rid of, and that means right there I'm making a cut and if Igo back to the RGB image, by clicking on it, that cut goes right through thislocation there, and you can actually view the image in the mask at the sametime by clicking on the eyeball in front of Hair Mask like so and you will seethis edge right there.You may not see the mask represented in CYAN, the way mine is and may berepresented in Red instead, but you should be able to make out this edge rightthere. Again that's just something I decided to do. All right, so what do Iwant you to do, I want you to go ahead and turn that hair mask Off, so we arejust seeing the composite RGB image and I want you to Ctrl-click orCommand-click in a Mac on hair mask in order to load it as a selection outline,because you have to convert things, the selection outlines and then back tomasks often times inside of Photoshop.

That's a non-destructive modification, selection outlines and masks areactually under the hood the exact same thing Anyway go back to the Layerspalette, smart object is active as you can see, make sure it is for you andthen drop down to the bottom of the Layers palette and click on this little AddLayer Mask icon and you have converted the mask to a layer mask, so you havecut her away from the background. So, everything that appears checkerboard istransparent now and everything that doesn't appear checkerboard, where youdon't see the checkerboard at all is completely opaque and then anywhere whereyou have some pixels and some checkerboard is translucency.

Now, if I were planning and compositing her against the different photographicimage, this mask would not be the best mask on earth and you can learn allabout that inside my Photoshop Channels and Masks series. However for theeffect I'm about to achieve, it's going to work out very, very nicely indeed.In the next exercise I'm going to show you how to apply the Sepia effect usingIndependent Adjustment layers.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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